CITY LORE; New York's Black Dahlia

By DANIEL STASHOWER

Published: October 8, 2006

''I never knew her in life,'' James Ellroy writes in ''The Black Dahlia,'' his landmark novel about the murder in 1947 of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, a beautiful, if troubled, aspiring actress. ''She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them.'' He adds, ''I wish I could have granted her an anonymous end.''

Certainly the horrific nature of the crime against Elizabeth Short, who was not only murdered but also cut in half, excites an unusual degree of horror. But the victim's youth and beauty, together with the haunted quality so evident in her photographs, could not have helped capturing the attention of a ravening press.

That her killer was never caught added a resonant note of justice denied, which in turn awakened the crusading instincts of many writers to come. ''It's the great L.A. murder,'' Ellroy insists. ''And L.A. has had some doozies.''

And yet, in the summer of 1841, a full century before the murder of Elizabeth Short gripped Los Angeles, the death of a 20-year-old sales clerk named Mary Cecilia Rogers sent the city of New York down an eerily parallel track. No less a figure than Edgar Allan Poe found himself pulled into what he described as the ''intense and long-enduring excitement,'' producing a story in which he not only laid out the many conflicting theories of the case but also claimed to have, as he put it, ''indicated the assassin.''

Like the Black Dahlia, Mary Rogers was a striking if melancholy beauty, with one admirer offering a poem to her womanly figure, raven tresses and ''dark smile.'' Her attractions were such that in 1838 she was hired to work behind the counter of a cigar store, on lower Broadway, where it was thought that her presence would encourage the male patrons to linger. Before long she had achieved a curious form of celebrity as ''the Beautiful Cigar Girl,'' as she was called by the papers, becoming one of the first women in New York to be famous for being talked about. Another poem, the work of a besotted journalist, described the stir she created:

She's picked for her beauty from many a belle,

And placed near the window, Havanas to sell

For well her employer's aware that her face is

An advertisement certain to empty his cases.

Other accounts were not quite so lighthearted. Although the hiring of attractive shopgirls was very much the custom in Europe, in America it was still considered somewhat unseemly. The New York Weekly Herald expressed an earnest desire that ''something should be done instantly to remedy the great evil consequent upon very beautiful girls being placed in cigar and confectionery stores.'' And the paper went on to say, ''Designing rich rascals drop into these places, buy cigars and sugar plums, gossip with the girl and ultimately effect her ruin.''

These fears proved tragically prophetic. On July 28, 1841, the body of Mary Rogers was found floating in the Hudson, a lace cord tied tightly about her neck. As news of the crime spread, the city's newspapers gave voice to a deep strain of unrest. To some, she represented an innocent lamb led to the slaughter, illustrating the failures of law enforcement. To others, she was a ''fallen woman'' led astray by the weaknesses of the flesh, an emblem of New York's descent into depravity. ''In one emphatic word,'' declared James Gordon Bennett of The Herald, ''New York is disgraced and dishonored in the eyes of the civilized world.''

In life, Mary Rogers had inspired a great deal of lead-footed poetry; in death, she called forth an entire shelf of potboiler fiction. A century later, the Black Dahlia would be a character in novels by John Gregory Dunne, Max Allan Collins and many others in addition to James Ellroy's. Mary Rogers, too, was taken up by some of the most popular writers of her day, each of whom spun the story into a lively melodrama. In J. H. Ingraham's ''Beautiful Cigar Girl,'' published in 1844, she endured not one but three kidnappings, culminating in headlines that reported a ''Horrible Suspicion of Murder!'' The suspicions proved unfounded. In the novel, if not in life, the young woman was found to be alive and well in England, having captured the heart of a British aristocrat.

A CHARACTER known as the Beautiful Cigar Girl also featured in ''Mysteries and Miseries of New York,'' published in 1848 by the prolific Edward Zane Carroll Judson under the pen name Ned Buntline. He intended the novel to stand as an indictment of New York's law enforcement; in lieu of a happy ending, he tacked on the text of a new piece of police reform legislation.

And while Buntline's novel threw suspicion on ''a gang of rowdies,'' Andrew Jackson Davis's ''Tale of a Physician: Or the Fruits and Seeds of Crime,'' published in 1869, cast blame on the ministrations of an unscrupulous doctor, the subtly named Doctor Morte, whom the young heroine consults on a matter of some delicacy. ''O mothers! Save your innocent daughters from a fate like this,'' the author wrote. ''And O daughters! Behold one of your sisters treading the black path to the tomb. Pity her! Save her!''

Whatever their failings, each of these novels made a concerted effort to grasp not only the drama of the case but also its technical aspects. But of all the writers to take up the matter, perhaps none approached the subject with more rigor than Poe, who even went so far as to share his thoughts on postmortem stomach gases produced by the ''acetous fermentation of vegetable matter.''

Poe's groundbreaking story ''The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'' considered by many to be the first detective story, had appeared two months before the Mary Rogers murder. In taking up the Cigar Girl case, Poe hoped to apply a similar display of ''ratiocination,'' or deductive reasoning, to a real-life puzzle, transforming the murder of Mary Rogers into the ''The Mystery of Marie Rog?''

For Poe, whose life was in chaos at the time, the story was far more than just an intellectual puzzle. ''She's a ghost,'' James Ellroy once said of the Black Dahlia, ''and a blank page to record our fears and desires.'' The remark would probably have appealed to Poe, who found many of his own life's obsessions reflected in the unhappy tale of the Cigar Girl. The death of a beautiful woman, he once wrote, ''is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.'' In the saga of Mary Rogers, Poe found a haunting young woman who appeared to have stepped from his own pages.

There is no telling what Mary Rogers herself would have made of all the attention. ''Now do I die in peace?'' asks a character at the end of Ingraham's ''Beautiful Cigar Girl.'' Even this, in Poe's universe, was a vexing question. As he wrote in an early draft of his famous ''Lenore'':

How shall the ritual, then, be read?

The requiem how be sung

For her most wrong'd of all the dead

That ever died so young?

Photos: GRIM DOINGS -- The cover of an 1844 novel inspired by the Mary Rogers case, and an illustration from the Edgar Allan Poe story ''The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.'' (Photo by Library of Congress)